Chef@Home: Shahila Abbasi welcomes — and cooks — for all

That Kind of Home

By Steve Barnes

The guest room at the Abbasi-Collins house often has a rotating roster of occupants, some of whom promise (or threaten) to become permanent residents. It’s that kind of home.

“It seems like there’s always people here. We love to have friends and family over, and when they’re here, we love to feed them,” says Shahila Abbasi, who on this afternoon has put out a spread of cured meats, cheese and accompaniments for pre-dinner noshing by a dozen people, including her mother, brothers, their wives and two nephews. Dinner will feature food from the Indian subcontinent, a nod to her father, who was born and raised in Pakistan and met his future wife in Albany’s Memorial Hospital: She’d broken her foot, and he was the X-ray tech.

During a tour of the house, Abbasi angles an ear toward the living room, silent except for a football announcer, and says, “My family must be eating — it’s the only time they’re quiet.”
Official guests aren’t the only ones who find the place welcoming. The back of the Loudonville house faces a country-club fairway, and passing golfers aware of who lives there like to shout, “Hey, I want a bloody mary” or, “Get me a beer!” On summer weekends, it’s not unusual for a cooler or bucket of iced brews to be left out back for the duffers. It’s that kind of home.

The chef at McGeary’s pub in Albany, Abbasi lives with barkeep/hostess extraordinaire Tess Collins, who has been a fixture in Albany bars and restaurants for 25 years. With a signature persona that is part den mother and part dominatrix, Collins oversaw dining at Justin’s restaurant for many years, followed by seven years as proprietress of Tess’ Lark Tavern. Since September 2010, Collins has been manager and part owner of McGeary’s, in downtown Albany, where Abbasi and much of the Lark Tavern staff found employment after a devastating fire destroyed the bar in spring 2010.

Abbasi, who trained at Schenectady County Community College’s acclaimed culinary program, became Lark Tavern’s head cook soon before Collins bought the venerable watering hole in late 2003. Over months of long hours to revitalize the place, romance bloomed, though Collins, who had previously dated only men, was slow to recognize it.

Says Abbasi, “I’d be on the phone with (my sister-in-law) saying, ‘I really think I’m having a major crush on my boss,’ and she’d be like, ‘Don’t do it!’ But I did. And here we are, still together.”

They do not fit any definition of a Loudonville couple, and not only because they’re both women. Collins is a nightlife queen who once beat a misbehaving customer with a shoe — he returned to seek, and received, forgiveness — and Abbasi is a chef so vibrant and feisty she nearly made it onto the Gordon Ramsay reality-show shoutfest that is Hell’s Kitchen.

But, Collins says, “This is the friendliest place I’ve ever lived.”

“We love our house,” Abbasi says.

“It’s the best thing that has happened to us in a long time,” adds Collins.

The house, about 50 years old, had fallen into disrepair some years back. Part of it had sunk, cracking the façade, and a malfunctioning furnace had blasted the interior with soot. A builder intent on living there fixed the foundation and expanded the home. It now boasts a bright, airy, contiguous kitchen-dining-living area that faces the lawn-like fairway, plus a screened porch and back deck. The yard features a miniature pond that’s home to goldfish, four frogs and a scampering chipmunk that stands sentinel on the pond’s rocky perimeter, where herbs grow.

“The groundhogs loved the cilantro,” Abbasi says. “They left all of the other herbs alone, but they really tore up the cilantro.”

The house even has a downstairs in-law suite, which Abbasi thinks may someday be a home for her mom. And despite the in-the-country feel of the backyard, she and Collins have but a 3-minute jaunt downtown to McGeary’s.

“This is such a good place for us to be,” Abbasi says as she cuddles with her 3 1/2-year-old nephew, Callum. She dotes him and on his younger brother, Grady, who was born in July. “I love my boys — and then they can go home with their parents,” Abbasi says.

“She’s great with them,” says the boys’ father, her brother, Imran, who is a local school principal. “I mean, she’s great with them now — at least she runs stuff by us, instead of just, ‘Oh, I did this with Callum!’”

Abbasi guffaws. “It only took me three years!” By temperament and inclination she seems to have been destined to be the cool, fun aunt, the one who will think it’s a swell idea to build a sledding run straight off the back porch and down across the sloping fairway. “We had a houseful of people for sleigh-riding,” Abbasi says.

That was around the time they posed Christmas decorations in a coital moment. “The humping reindeer were not tacky,” Abassi insists.

Says Collins, “I decorate (for Christmas) like a Macy’s gay man. It looks like the house that Santa threw up on.”

Later, as daylight dwindles and sated bellies incline guests to linger at the table and talk over the last of the red wine, Abbasi stands in the kitchen, her elbow on the counter and chin cupped in her palm.

“This is my favorite part of cooking: Me here, watching, everyone else eating,” she says. “This is what I love to do: watch people eat and drink together. I love that we have a place where people want to come to be together.” It’s that kind of home.

5 Responses

They are a beautiful couple and wonderful people who do so much for the community. Albany is a very lucky to have them!!! And Shy’s cooking is outrageous if you haven’t had it yet you can’t die until you do!!